AUDIO: Luis Buñuel’s The Young One: Anatomy of White Male Supremacy We open with the jazz tune, “Epistrophy,” from Eric Dolphy’s Last Date recorded in Holland in 1964. Epistrophe, from the Greek, means “a turning about” – and applied to The Young One, a constant shift of moral perspective with no settled view. As with our recent show […]

AUDIO: What Bullets do to Bodies and Lives This is the special 90-minute finale for our series A Targeted Divide. It’s called “What Bullets do to Bodies and Lives: Structural Violence, Firearms, and Surviving Gunshot Wounds.” We know a lot about gun homicide, much less about what life is like for the wounded living: What […]

AUDIO: Crime, Decline, and the Rise of the Citizen Protector For our second show in our three-part series, A Targeted Divide, we bring you “Crime, Decline, and the Rise of the Citizen-Protector: How the Meaning of Citizenship Is Changing in a Nation Awash in Firearms.” In response to economic decline and reductions in services provided […]

AUDIO: Undermining Zinctown We open with music composed by Sol Kaplan for the film Salt of the Earth. Kaplan was blacklisted in the 1950s for being “uncooperative” to HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. The rest of our music will feature the work of other blacklisted artists and performers; Hazel Scott, Yip Harburg, Marc Blitzstein, […]

AUDIO: Capital’s (Hidden) Art of War and the Belly of the Revolution In the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh rejects the grain offering of the farmer, Cain, while accepting the flesh offering of his brother, the shepherd Abel. Cain, wounded by this rejection, murders his brother. The consequence is banishment to the […]

Last night we saw a movie with friends and then went out to share a meal and chat. Normal sounding stuff but really a bit sideways to normal. We went to Güeros, a Spanish language film. As I don’t know Spanish I was happy it was subtitled so my eyes could see what my ears […]

Preface to the Paperback Edition of George Kateb’s Utopia and Its Enemies (1972, 1963). “Of course, no honest person claims that happiness is now a normal condition among human beings; but perhaps it could be made normal, and it is upon this question that all serious political controversy really turns.” “Happiness is notoriously difficult to […]

About a year ago there was a very dismissive review written by Lisa Levy published in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) of the essay collection The Essential Ellen Willis (“Irritated Critics“) . Ellen Wills is a wonderful writer who will teach you so much–especially if you’ve never heard of her; especially if you are young; especially if you […]

I’m never sure how I can defend a critique against technology–it seems as though we have gained so much. And whenever I rant against drones or iPads (or the very device upon which I’m pecking) someone will pipe up, “I s’pose you’d prefer we didn’t have penicillin either!” Maybe. I’m really not sure. By which […]

We watched Whiplash last night. By all accounts it was an intense experience. Nerve-wracking to say the least. Perhaps triumphant in the end, but I don’t think so. Have you seen it? If not, in brief, a boy (19) who is a drummer and aspiring to be “one of the greats” is at the most […]